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The No-GPS Road Trip (popularmechanics.com)
Ezra Dyer, a reporter at Popular Mechanics, decided to ditch the GPS system he has on his car and the mapping service on his phone to see how hard it could be to go to North Carolina from his home, Louisville, Kentucky. He shares his experience: I begin downtown, by the river. It seems that if I get on 32 East, I can find Route 150 toward Tennessee. It takes about one block for my plan to fall apart. The street I'm on dead-ends and forces me onto a seemingly parallel road that soon wanders off at an angle. I discover that there's the fancy, Kentucky Derby side of Louisville, but also the Thorobred Lounge gentleman's club side. Somehow, I blunder onto Interstate 264, a ring road, where the exit numbers indicate that I'm at least ten miles from where I thought I was. And yet, it works out. See, this is the way you used to do it. You keep driving. I exit for Route 32 and settle in for a long drive east. I aim to make it to Knoxville by dinner without having any real idea of whether that's possible. It doesn't help that my atlas crams all of Kentucky onto two pages, printed with fonts evidently developed by those calligraphers who can write the Magna Carta on a piece of capellini. So I stop at a gas station to buy a local map. There are none to be found, so I pull into the next gas station. Then a third. In my mind's eye, there are metal racks at every gas station, over near the door, stocked with maps. Well, those don't exist anymore. I don't know when they disappeared, but they're gone. "Try Walmart," says one cashier, as if I could find it. About an hour in, I'm in traffic-clogged strip-mall hell, stoplights to the horizon. The upside is that I have no concept of time. Instead of compulsively checking a screen to anguish over my plight, I drive. I'm curiously peaceful. I can't do anything about the traffic, so I exist in it, placid. And eventually it gives way, the stoplights dissipating into lush Kentucky countryside. The Defender is happy to amble along at 55 mph, so amble I do, down to Route 150 toward the Tennessee border. Read the full story here.
That's basically how I still do all my road trips. Get out the paper maps!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
there was some kinda of paper navigation tool you could fold up and keep in the glove box. Or perhaps even a book of said previous things.....
Imagine, no cell phone either and if you broke down on the road, having to walk to find a pay phone (which no longer exists)
Yeah, this was reality less than 20 years ago. wow, Millennials, the generation more out of touch with the past faster than any previous generation in existence. This goes along with the guy who "found" "free tv" using an antenna the other week.
If shit every really does hit the fan and we start living in a post-apocalyptic world where tech no longer works, Millennials will be the first batch of people to just simply die off.
So you do the same thing you should be doing with your phone: you pull over, put the car in park, and pour over the maps until you figure it out.
If you think it's tough in a car, try doing it in a plane sometime. In that case pulling over is not such a trivial task.
...did a road trip become rocket science that requires a computer?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...for decades. I'm 70. It works, but it sucks. Basically you have to read the make, MEMORIZE your turns, and then go. On interstates, that'll take you a long ways, but in town? Forget it, you're going to have to stop after a while and memorize the next set of turns if it goes on too long. Then of course there's the question of whether this is the right turn or is it the interesection that is 200 feet up the road. Signs? Signs? We don't need no steekin' signs.... yes we do, but if they're the size of a postage stamp, it matters with a map, not so much with a GPS. And then there's the signs that are big enough, but have 6 trees growing up around them and are covered with a poison ivy plant yet to boot.
Driving has always been an adventure, but we don't have to get silly about it. Use the GPS...
Not that long ago (a bit more than a decade or so) Cars didn't have GPS. Long before we had them at all, I used to drive regularly from Detroit to DC and Texas. I could even make it back from those destinations! :O
When I moved from Detroit to CA, I planned my route with maps and drove based on my instructions with maps as a backup. I can tell East from West by looking at the Sun, so I can tell if I'm going the right direction. All of this stuff used to be 2nd nature to people. Now I have to read about some person's heroic effort to travel about 500 miles? Really?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.